The roadmap for writeups.org for 2011 hasn’t been finalised yet – but it’s not going to be as big as 2010, which saw the launch of version 4 of the site, the switch to a very powerful search engine technology, an overhaul of the ‘New’ page and a first wave of rewrites for entries that had not aged gracefully.

2011 will hopefully, tentatively, include further improvements in the quality of texts, more revisions of old things, the actual launch of our Mutants and Masterminds projects, some very basic integration of social media and better referencing in search engines.

The traffic on the site is still slowly growing, but of course the subject remains a very niche one, at the intersection of two niche hobbies. We’re reliably past the thresholds of 1,000 visits/day and 100,000 pages/month, though.

The early February publication batch is a bit larger than most recent batches :

• INFINITY INC. V2s. We have very old sets of notes about Brainwave II and Hourman II. Nearly two years ago these were rewritten, and I… completely forgot to publish them. Despite being the one who wrote them. The new texts, stats and art are now online.
• RONNIE THUNDERBOLTS ART. Another few bits in this batch :
  • Cutthroat
  • Cyclops (Early)
  • Cyclops (Classic)
  • D-Man
  • Dagger (Later)
  • Daredevil
  • Deadpool
• THE INCREDIBLES. Pufnstuff’s coverage of this beloved movie ain’t over – this batch presents Frozone, voice-acted by Samuel L. Jackson.
• GREAT TEN. Only a handful of super-functionaries left. In this batch Gareth covers the most unusual one – Mother of Champions.
• EVERQUEST. Another entry from our (small) Everquest arc – a large-ish profile of Lady Vox, a white dragon of some importance in both game lore and MMORPG history.
• JAMES BOND. Peter has some more stuff about cinematic James Bond villains – this time Max Zorin, Christopher Walken’s character in A view to a kill.
• VIDEO GAMES CHARACTERS. This batch has two such entries:
  • Shermie from King of Fighters continuing Tom’s huge arc about beat ‘em up characters
  • Cole McGrath from the critically acclaimed inFamous gets an entry by Peter
• This batch has two very powerful villains. The first such villain is the pre-Crisis version of the invincible alien powerhouse Mongul (on a post-Crisis scale), as covered by Chris.
• ULTRON. The other powerful big bad is a result of Roy’s work to cover the various Ultron robots. The new writeups covers Ultron-8 through Ultron-12, possibly the most familiar ones for long time comics readers.
• CLAN DESTINE. In this batch, Bryan covers Wallop, despite the obvious risk of bodily harm.
• REWORKED ENTRIES. Beyond the two Infinity, Inc. ones :
  • Bullet Biker. Redone all the texts (stopped quoting Marvunapp, streamlined stats, additional data, new art, etc.)
  • Red Raven (Universe AZ version) (small corrections by the author)
  • Cutthroat (texts rewritten for concision, better organisation, small update)
  • Underdog (new art for this very, very, very old entry)
  • Midnighter (Revised take) (some additional art)
  • Pinhead (some additional art)
  • Wildfire (pre-Crisis) (additional banner art)
  • Thunderbird II (texts entirely rewritten, much more art)

Which brings us to 4,485 entries.

This batch is mostly my stuff, which I don’t usually do — but recent articles of mine have closed two arcs of writeups that had been left unfinished for months, and I’d like to get this stuff online, declare victory and move on. Roll call :

• VILLAINY, INC. The final profile — the modern version of Queen Clea — is now in, which is good if you want to use those villainesses in your games. More Wonder Woman stuff is being worked on.
• AGENTS OF ATLAS. The last profile that was missing from our current Agents of Atlas work (there’ll also be more later) is the Golden Age version of Namora – here she is. As long as the books are open and I’m busy doing the illustrations, here comes the associated material :
  • Two lame, typical 1940s villains to serve as samples and examples, the Phantom Troubadour and the Viking
  • Karlak of Mu, a more memorable villain (with considerations about Mu, too)
  • Pharaoh Tut-Ak-Mun, also more or less okay as a villain (with considerations about hieroglyphics, too)
• FIGHTING GAMES. More King of Fighters material from Tom, this time Chizuru Kagura.
• GREAT TEN. Doggedly continuing Gareth’s arc ’til we run out of super-functionaries — the Seven Deadly Brothers.
• REWORKED ENTRIES. We don’t exactly have a full-time editor on retainer, and the gods know that having one is a key step in publishing anything… But we can self-edit, though of course it only works when one has had the time to completely forget about the text. Anyway, improvements in this batch :
  • Aleta (cleaner version of the main shot)
  • Asp II (a fair bit of extra and improved art, texts reworked for clarity and style, history updated)
  • Black Mamba (a fair bit of extra and improved art, texts reworked for clarity and style, history updated)
  • Black Widow III (Belova) (minor extra art, text reworked for clarity and style)
  • Blink (a few extra shots of art, text reworked for clarity and style)
  • Crossbow (additional art, texts completely rewritten to eliminate Marvunapp quoing, some extra content)
  • Deadpool (new main shot, quick polishing of the texts, *then* a quick round of updates and corrections to make this very, very old entry useful)
  • Deathbird (Modern era) (extra banner from one of the video games, edited and polished texts, relatives list updated)
  • Deathbird (Classic era) (edited and polished texts, relatives list updated)
  • Elektra (a fair bit of additional art, minor additional text polishing)
  • Gom Jabbar (some additional art, additional text polishing)
  • Gladiator III (one additional shot, texts polishing and reformatting)
  • Vindicator II (one extra piece of art, quick polishing of texts)

4,476 entries today.

Time to pop up, take a few shots and dive back under cover. Roll call:

• NEWS PAGE. That’s the page you’re currently reading. Well, the late December WordPress security update mysteriously fixed the layout issues introduced by the previous WordPress update. Hurray security. Or something.
• REVIEWS/EDITS/QUASI-V2s. There’s fewer of those since this batch is dominated by new content. In this batch :
  • Diamondback II (first writeup). No new information or change in stats, but these entries were just horribly written. All the texts have been redone and it now reads much better.
  • Señor Suerte
  • Hardcase (first writeup). This was a very old entry indeed. New information, rewrite of the stuff that wasn’t well written, new (and much improved) art, that sort of things.
  • The Derangers (the Canadian superhuman mental patients) have had their real names revealed in a recent Marvel sourcebook, so the following entries have been updated : Breakdown, Freakout, and Janus.
  • Triple-Iron. This is one of the few entries that still quoted Marvunapp content, so the texts have been rewritten from original research.
• INVINCIBLE STUFF. A wholly new entry – Angstrom Levy, one of Invincible’s foes, as covered by Bryan.
• CLAN DESTINE. Another arc by Bryan ; logically enough it starts with Adam Destine.
• FIGHTING GAMES. Tom’s beat ‘em up video game entry for this one is Clark Still from King of Fighters
• THE AUTHORITY. Continuing to cover these major characters, Peter now presents the Doctor.
• THE RED STAR. The last entry that needed to be revised and much improved is now done — Guardsman Kyuzo is now back on duty. Next — completely new entries !
• EVERQUEST. Now that the lone existing entry has been redone, let’s trickle a few useful critters in, such as spite golems from the Plane of Hate.
• Said critter led to finding an unpublished set of stats from one of Kal El’s tests with his random character generator. Now it’s in to join the rest, and his name’s Golem.
• The GREAT TEN. Yep, we’re not done yet. There’s, like, ten of them ! In this batch, Gareth’s entry for Thundermind.
• Vengeance is a super-minor Green Arrow villain (and I just realised before uploading that he’s since been killed in yet another gratuitous attempt to pad the resume of the villain of the month), who’s useful in a low-powered way
• And finally, we have a new home-brewed version of a parallel-universe Superman, this one by Hominid71.

And that’s 4,468 entries for y’all.

Happy new year with writeups.org ! Here’s another small thing concentrating on upgrading and expanding existing material while I have a bit of time. Roll call:

• EDITING. The following entries have been through a few good rounds of editing and polishing :
  • Torpedo (P.A.C.K.)
  • Diable
  • Death Doll
  • Scarab (quite a few clarifications plus technical improvements and a new Advantage). This is now version 1.3 – this guy is pretty hard to get right.
  • Jadis the White Witch
  • Sonny Sumo (various changes and some additional material)
  • Mister Clean, the one-man mutant massacre
  • Red Raven – the Universe AZ version of this character has been revised by the author, and the biography expanded.
• RED STAR. Another The Red Star character has been completely overhauled – namely Krawl Captain Alexandra Goncharova. More next batch, hopefully.
• Diamondback. The enhanced/post-transfusion writeup has been updated. Beyond some editorial polishing, it now sports additional paragraphs to bring her History section up to date.
• FIGHTING GAMES. Tom’s beat ‘em up game entry for this batch is Ryuji Yamazaki, the psychokiller from King of Fighters.
• The other new thing in this batch is Hominid’s Future Era Soldiers entry, using military speculation about the next generations of infantry gear in the XXIst century to produce a new set of generic writeups.
• LINKS PAGE. Some updates and a new link — mostly intended as a very quick guide to online appearances indices. The rest remains your compilation of good sites of interest to writeups.org readers.

And thus we reacheth 4,459 entries, which should keep you busy even during stretches where we can’t update that much.